In each country, community-dwelling elderly
people accumulated deficits at about 3% per year. By con-
trast, people from clinical/institutional samples showed no
relationship between frailty and age. Relative fitness/frailty
in both sexes was highly correlated (correlation coefficient
4
0.95,
P
o
.001) with mortality, although women, at any
given age, were frailer and had lowermortality. Onaverage,
each unit increase in deficits increased by 4% the hazard
rate for mortality (95% confidence interval
5
0.02–0.06)